This specification relates to search systems.
The Internet provides access to a wide variety of resources, examples of which include video or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, book articles, and news articles. A search engine can identify resources in response to a user query that includes one or more search terms or phrases. The search engine ranks the resources based on their relevance to the query and importance and provides search results that link to the identified resources.
The resources referred to by the search results may take different amounts of time to load in users' web browsers. For example, for any particular resource, the size of the resource, the number of images the resource includes or references, the web server that serves the resource, and the particular network connection can impact the amount of time the resource takes to load in a user's web browser. Given two resources that are of similar relevance to a search query, a typical user may prefer to visit the resource having the shorter load time.